Engines

[josh]

can someone please explain to me the purpose of graphics and physics engines and how they work?

[the_short1]

what kind of physic engines ? ?? ? ? like gravity.. or w/e like taht??


graphics... liuke particle engines ?? 3d??

[josh]

I am not quite sure, I was watching some E3 videos about games and they where talking about how they made a really good physics engine for car crashes. Also on this site I have seen "3D engines" and othe graphics engine things.

In general when the word engine is used to refer to software what does it mean?

[Tony]

engine is the core code that drives the basics of your program.

A physics engine is responsible for physical forces of your world, such as gravity, collisions, etc.

A graphics engine is responsible for drawing your graphics. That would include shading, lighting and any other visual effects.

A good example would be Half-Life and Counter Strike games. Two different games, but they look and feel similar because Counter Strike is build on top of HL's engine(s)

[josh]

but how do engines work (what does the code look like/do) does it take graphics files and render them in 3D? or for a physics engine does it contain math equations that state how objects move?

Are engines used so you do not have to keep writing certain code over and over?

[Catalyst]

engines are just classes and algorithms that handle a certain task. They can be compiled to DLLs, static libs, or just included in the code

A graphics engine will most likely have classes for handling primitives and models, levels, and scene graphs

e.g. Ogre http://www.ogre3d.org/

A physics engine will most likely have mass,spring, and collision primitives to use to check collisions between objects


e.g. ODE http://ode.org/

yes they are used so that code does not have to be repeated or to same time using the ready done engine instead of making their own

[the_short1]

u want to see how a 3d engine looks like... i think catalist or zylum posted their engine in source....

[josh]

thanx for the explanation guys, now I understand.